Selling a room and a stream at the same time

The economics of a hybrid event are unusual: the physical room has a hard ceiling set by licensing and fire safety, and the stream does not. Every stream ticket after the first is close to pure margin, and the audience for it is geographically unbounded.

A stream ticket is a ticket

It is a tier like any other, with its own price, its own quantity — capped or unlimited — and its own on-sale window. It appears in the buyer's wallet next to their physical tickets rather than as a separate class of thing they have to remember to find.

Access is checked at the door, not at the pixel

The player opens for the account holding a valid ticket, a configurable number of minutes before the start rather than days early, and it says when rather than only no. A redeemed ticket keeps access — somebody who left the room early paid for the whole thing — and a refunded one loses it.

The embed URL is absent from the response entirely unless the caller holds a ticket. Rendering it into the page and hiding the player would be theatre, because anyone can read a page source; a refusal carries no URL at all, and there is a test that asserts exactly that.

The limit, stated plainly

A ticket holder can forward the link. We can tell you it is happening — views count distinct tickets and opens per ticket, so one ticket opening from forty places is visible — but we cannot stop it. Preventing it needs signed, short-lived playback URLs from a streaming provider, which is a sixth vendor and therefore a decision rather than a task.

Anybody claiming otherwise about a plain embed is describing something they have not built. Access here is gated at the door, not at the pixel, and it is worth knowing which one you are buying.

Replay is a decision, not a default

Whether the recording stays available afterwards, and for how long, is set per event. It affects what you can sell and what you have licensed — a performance rights agreement covering a live transmission frequently does not cover an indefinite archive.

Chat, without the impersonation

Live chat is written only through the API, which re-checks entitlement and takes the display name from the ticket — otherwise anybody posts as the organiser. It is rate-limited per person, and moderation hides rather than deletes, so what was removed is still auditable afterwards.

Where it genuinely earns its keep

Conferences, talks and showcases, where the value is the content rather than the room. For a club night the stream is a marketing asset rather than a product, and pricing it as a product usually disappoints everyone.